


Night visions

by OceanPlanet



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Langst, M/M, Post-Break Up, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 08 Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:02:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23675074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OceanPlanet/pseuds/OceanPlanet
Summary: On the third month anniversary of returning home, Lance decides to give space to nostalgia.
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Kudos: 22





	Night visions

**Author's Note:**

> to y'all who yearn  
> my sweet dudes

On the third month anniversary of returning home, Lance decides to give space to nostalgia. 

Most of his family is asleep, the television still running like a warm summer candle downstairs, and Lance stands in his room, a pack of apple juice his mom keeps buying and he keeps drinking in one hand, and his phone in the other.

It is startling, the familiarity of it; as if he had never undergone the pulling and stretching of the universe that rewired so many pathways in his brain and added muscles to his bones and ate away at his feet and exercised his heart. In the daylight, it is an externalization of sporadic parts of his old selves, chronological and a little messy; during sunsets, polaroid photos above the desk obtain an orange aura of ethereality, everything about them youthful; in dusk, the smell of wooden furniture awakens yearning, old, old like himself. He turns off the lights. 

Two months ago he fell asleep at his cousins' house. The most spacious, the least crammed with materialized memories and the most crammed with interconnectivity, a house for celebrations and family, a place for celebrating a month of Lance. Every day of him is worth celebrating, these days, and he can't not be aware of every day being a day and it ending like a day and the new day beginning like a day, and he hugs his family more than they're used to, and Veronica invites him to backyard picnics and his mom makes him lemonade with almost too much sugar but not enough to make him want to say anything.

One month ago, there wasn't a celebration and everyone knew it. It was a spontaneous and flowy decision, an easy selective ignorance, and everybody mentioned the anniversary at one point in the day in a way that implied the normality of Lance being back. It didn't need a celebration, and nobody was celebrating it, and it hung above them like the sun.

Today has been a perfect day for pretending his presence doesn't still feel shaky, and nobody even mentioned it. Everybody was thinking it, Lance could tell, and he has thought of nothing else.

He stands in the dark, enough light coming from his window to be able to see all outlines, and all details, too, if one is familiar with them enough. He moves, slowly, and kind of – ends up kneeling by his bed. He pulls the little straw off the juice pack and pushes it so it breaks the little packing, and then puts it through the little silver circle on the pack, and he is not ready, not ready at all, for nostalgia to come at him full power and full speed.

His fingers are unsteady at this abstract form of longing. He feels like he's standing above an ouija board, calling for ghosts; he wants this, and he doesn't know what to do with it. The juice tastes like juice but his throat feels like pushed down sentimentality erupting in vulcanic forms.

It doesn't even feel like longing. He draws the conscious connections: nostalgia is yearning for the past; nostalgia is searching for existential meaning; nostalgia comes in different brands and can taste a lot like melancholy, and it is a made-up concept attempting to describe – this, all forms of this, and he doesn't have another name for this. He is night sky and shooting stars and sky-fired wishes unstable.

He intended to give nostalgia all his space and all his goods to lure it out, but he has tears on his face and he thinks _Hits like it means it_ and _God, it would be a dangerous idea_ at his plan to play the songs from the playlist he prepared.

So he sits. Sits on his knees and draws apple juice through the straw like a magnet and it soothes his closing throat and he cries.

And the ghosts creep in

Slowly, on tips of their toes

He's been in the room for long enough to acquire nigh vision

Taking pale moonshine to reflect off their edges

And he misses

And he misses

And he misses Keith.

Three months' worth of celebration and he is still – here, there.

Before, chapters of his personal narrative ago, peripheral to his one-dimensional drive into multiple directions, but mostly skywards, he had a couple of crushes. One morning during breakfast Veronika, while Lance was dipping his butter toast into hot chocolate, told him about the fight she had with her boyfriend; about the fights, and misunderstandings, and black holes in communication and doubtful thoughts about doubtful decisions. 

''Why are hugs and kisses so missable?'' she asked, with a kind of a smile, and Lance agreed, but now he thinks he agreed half-heartedly, because this younger Lance hadn't known what this familiarity feels like when it's hot in your aorta and when your body adjusts and it's a pleasant escapist warmth.

And he misses

He did come for nostalgia, but a different kind

And he misses

Hasn't it been enough? Just stop already

He has a double bed now. His mom bought it for him. He thinks of his kind of hard mattress on the castle, now a fairy tale of a castle, made up, no longer real. He thinks of almost falling off and then pushing back into Keith to stay on. He thinks of how impossibly perfectly comfortable they were one night, impossible match of body angles and molding of soft and sharp parts, so perfect, more that he thought should be possible – if he had to draw it, he wouldn't know how. Logic didn't exist, boundaries merged into tinier dimensions, everything everywhere, ends and stars and outlines. They didn't stay long like that, because he had to go to the bathroom. Keith was already asleep when he came back three minutes later, and he wondered at that, but mostly he came close, laid down, moved closer, gently, like a hurricane, with all his heart at once, and instead of running out of it he was generating more and more, alive alive alive.

He chews on his straw when there is no more juice left, heart just – doing – this thing. He thinks thinks cannot stop thinking. The kind of physical coexistence is hard to erase from your bones and the memory of it eats away the muscles around them in its absence. His mom has noticed him losing weight, just a little bit, and now he gets bigger fruit salads and more biscuits with his coffee and more lemonade.

He wants to keep the thought of his new bed to himself but he can't help imagining, vaguely, he doesn't let himself finish any of the sentences

He thought he was – done with it, so many times. On the castle. On the castle, again and again, heart giving up and giving in again and again and again. The first night back, the second night back, a week later, the night after he finished talking to Shiro for the first time, the night after that.

He doesn't know how to balance life forces because he doesn't know what the balance should be like. He had felt so alive, and these days he has the sun on his face and familiarity that feels like warm oceans and it has been nice; don't think like that, remember what you breathed in between alive moments, you don't know what you want

This – this missing, it feels sharp

His nigh vision is a little blurry and it is what it is, and the ghosts dance around him and he waits them out as they keep coming

He wanted this

**Author's Note:**

> hello this might be a prequel  
> préqüèł


End file.
